Wednesday, 27 August 2014

A friend of mine is getting married on Friday - and I have golden dress but no jewelery. The wedding should be in white, yellow and gold.

The earrings are not very individualistic - I saw the design in the shop where I got the wings. They're very simple - just put a drop, wings and pearl to the little nail and make a loop at the end.

The necklace is more interesting - I was working with the crimps for the first time. I put one of them to each side of the pendant to hold it in place. Then I took the flat part of pliers and squished them flat. Crimps are also used to hold the fastening - they should be pressed really strong.
I measured the distances and drew with a permanent marker. I threaded all the beads to both sides, attached the fastening and then used the crimps again to hold the beads.

The little heart between each pair of wings is so cute for the wedding :-)

Monday, 25 August 2014

Our friend's having a wedding and we decided to dance there. We wanted to make skirts in gold - the wedding will be gold, white and yellow.

The pattern is very simple and leaves the least remains possible. You just cut out a stripe from the fabric, fold it five times, pin the template on and cut five times at once.

It always gives you five big and five small pieces.
I folded the belt in half, tucked both edges in and ironed. I put twenty big pieces inside to get the hips' size minus 6. Then I laid another layer of small pieces, to the middle of the big ones.

I sewed along the edge. I'd tried to pinn it so that the pins can stay there (quite far to the left).

Thursday, 21 August 2014

My boyfriend has birthday soon and I decided to make something special for him. We and couple of friends are building a small medieval village and I have chosen the most significant building. I printed a picture and was wondering how to transfer the image to black T-shirt with the least effort :)

So I folded the paper around the tower edges, drew lines around it and went on until I had the whole outline. The main proportions were right this way, than I drew the inner lines freehand.

I sewed the roof in light brown. To show the shadow under it, I used dark brown - I switched the color in the middle of line.

It is always good to have the same amount of stitch lines (more than one for a thin sewing thread). I went twice on every place.

At the roof and sides I made one zigzag, when I sewed back I did the zigzag the other way round, so the vertical lines were doubled.

Finally I doubled the outline. It's a bit like drawing house in one move :-) Seriously, at the tower, the most annoying was cutting the threads, pulling them back and tie. I did it at least ten times the roof.

You can see that the embroidery hoop leaves a trace. You should always embroider in a hoop, preferably with interfacing under.

At the fence I stretched the fabric to the hoop really tight, the stitches would shrink the fabric even more at wertical direction, where T-shirts stretch the most.

When I made wattle fence, I drew a bit of rastr. You don't have to draw every line you embroider, but it's good to have something to keep the right direction.

At the back, a name of his favourite god is to be written in Futhark runes. Who can say which one it is? :-)

I was quite afraid doing applique on knit. I ironed the fusible interfacing on the red knit and cut out the letters. I also ironed it on the wrong side of the T-shirt, but as small pieces as possible. I marked their position by pin - I put it to the tips and drew a mark from the wrong side.

When I started sewing, I wished I'd used a double sided fusible interfacing, it helps a lot. I was afraid to use too dense zigzag stitch on knit, so I ended up with this.

At this project, the only thing I didn't draw freehand was the tower outline. Formerly I would have printed the letters, cut and outline. Not here. Even the loki went that way. But it's important to mark the height of the letters first. The neat width was kept because I sewed at a foot-width.

The letters had easy shapes so I could use a stitch when the machine makes one stitch forward, one backward and two forward. It looks the best when you can use feeding and don't have too many curves.

Not working anymore today, I've been embroidering for about six hours in a row and I'm dead! But only one writing remains, ironing and it will be done.